The Joy of the World Cup Just Collided With Trump

The tournament had weathered a series of scandals related to the current administration. Now, a red card reversal threatens to upend it.

This year’s World Cup has been unusually thrilling on the field, even by the tournament’s high standards for drama, and has largely gone off without a hitch, despite prior concerns about stadium travel logistics for fans and whether the obscenely expensive matches would sell out. But the Cup has not been without off-field controversy, thanks largely to the Trump administration’s xenophobia. The U.S. blocked a FIFA referee from Somalia from entering the country, and did not allow the Iranian national team to stay in the country for more than one night before its two matches in Los Angeles, forcing them to be based in Tijuana, Mexico (for Iran’s third match, in Seattle, the team was allowed to arrive two nights beforehand, though the team had to leave the country soon after each of their games concluded).

Yet those moves, and the unavoidable reality that the principal host nation is run by an authoritarian president, somehow have not sullied the World Cup, which, at its best, serves as a potent display of multiculturalism and global togetherness. Hundreds of thousands of fans from all over the world have been welcomed to the U.S., whose national team includes players who have spent most of their lives living abroad, principally in Europe. No player better represents that World Cup than Folarin Balogun, a star striker at Monaco in France’s top league and the U.S. team’s highest scorer in this tournament. Balogun is a U.S. citizen only because his mother was deemed too pregnant to fly back to England from........

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